Fabien Mérelle is a highly talented and emerging young French artist born in Fontenay-sous-Bois, France, 1981, who creates delicately detailed drawings in black ink and watercolour. A recent graduate from the Beaux-Arts academy in Paris, Mérelle received a scholarship in 2005 to attend the Beaux-Arts academy in Xi’An, China. Already passionate about the art of drawing, this trans-global opportunity permitted Mérelle to discover and perfect the use of alternative Eastern drawing techniques, such as Chinese ink. Upon his return to the West, Mérelle was granted a residence at the prestigious Casa Vélasquez in Madrid and in 2010 he was the first winner of the highly lauded Canson Prize.

These renderings, simultaneously absurd, humorous, ironic and cruel, weave their own tapestry of tales and legends, blurring the line between what has been written and what our memory has forged. Mérelle’s insistence on anatomical precision, an art historical tradition borrowed from great draughtsmen such as Albrecht Dürer, adds a dimension of doubt and moderate belief, as the viewer simultaneously quizzes yet recognises and understands what he sees. Mérelle thus brings our inner thoughts and mental scenarios on to the surface of a page, channelling psychological theories of great 20th century thinkers such as Pierre Janet, and providing viewers with a visual of what the depths of our minds might conjure.

Q: Despite the small format, your drawings seem to tell a story, always somewhere between dream and reality.?

A: That's my goal, my challenge, to tell a story. The paper is a stage, a theatre. The literary equivalent would be a short story, definitely not a novel. Something short but very dense. During my studies at the Beaux-Arts, I spent four months in China on an exchange programme. I was alone in a building that was still being built. Totally alone in this huge tower … All my childhood fears came back to me. I put myself in my drawings for the first time, and I ridiculed my phobias, my mythological fears. Since then I have continued drawing myself, telling the stories of my daily life, my dreams and the little events that punctuate my days.

A: I draw compulsively. The desire usually starts with a detail. For a drawing with a big elephant, everything began with the ear. I just really wanted to draw an elephant's ear! I can't draw well if the desire isn't there. The detail then provides a structure for the rest. I want the realism to allow me to do things that are completely unrealistic, like talking to my grandfather, for example, who is no longer with us, or flying on the back of a giant squirrel…

A: My work is a kind of copy/paste. I take things from all over the place. I use my iPhone to photograph things or people in the street: a woman, a homeless person, a crowd, sheep on a bench … Then I try to reappropriate things, reality, for myself. I have never been satisfied with a drawing in my life, but there comes a point where I have to stop. Otherwise, I would just keep starting again. The volume of a thigh, the fold of a trouser leg … Working on several drawings at once helps me step back and leave a drawing alone. I often go too far in the detail and ruin a drawing. It's better to say too little than too much.

I found fascinating, imaginative and brilliantly executed the drawings of Fabien, and its translation into sculptures also very interesting, although the hyperrealism and level of detail of their ink and watercolor on paper works in itself confer a presence impressive enough as to be almost unnecessary this translation of the artist's universe. In any case, the "Pentateuch" well worth the three dimensions.

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